Saturday, January 5, 2013

“Bradman’s
achievements stagger the imagination. No writer of boys’ fiction would dare to
invent a hero who performed with Bradman’s continual consistency. His
batsmanship delights one’s knowledge of the game, his every stroke is a
dazzling and precious stone in the game’s crown,” was Sir Neville Cardus’
famous observation. So, was Bradman the best batsman of all time?

He
was certainly the greatest rungetter if the criterion is runs per innings and
the frequency with which he got the big scores - centuries and, more
significantly, double centuries. But was he the best in terms of quality, in
all conditions, against all types of bowling? Critics have put forward various
theories and lauded the merits of several great batsmen for nearly a
century-and-a-half.

Inarguably,
the first great batsman was W.G. Grace. He is credited with developing batting
technique as we know it today. Another wizard who joined Grace during the later
stages of his career, K.S. Ranjitsinhji wrote in The Jubilee Book of Cricket (1897): “He revolutionized batting. He
turned it from an accomplishment into a science….. Before W.G. batsmen were of
two kinds; a batsman played a forward game or he played a back game….. It was
bad cricket to hit a straight ball; as for pulling a long hop, it was regarded
as immoral. What W.G. did was to unite in his mighty self all the good points
of all the good players and to make utility the criterion of style. He founded
the modern theory of batting by making forward and back play of equal
importance, relying neither on one nor the other, but both….. I hold him to be,
not only the finest player born or unborn, but the maker of modern batting. He
turned the old one-stringed instrument into a many chorded lyre.”

The
emergence of Grace saw significant developments in the game. In 1864, over-arm
bowling was approved. Grace was then able to develop batting technique that
countered this revolutionary over-the-shoulder style of delivering the ball.
Cricket received the impetus it required. County cricket began the same year,
as was Wisden first published.

The
popular image of Dr. William Gilbert Grace is that of the Grand Old Man,
portly, ageing, with a flowing grey beard. But his best came very early in his
career. It is reckoned that he was at eighteen years the best batsman in England, and
consequently the world. That was in 1866 when, as Vic Marks wrote in The Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket:
“W.G. was creating new standards that no one else could reach.” Playing for an
England XI against Surrey, Grace scored 224
not out in a crushing victory of an innings and 300 runs. Marks recounted: “On
the last afternoon his captain gave him permission to pop off to CrystalPalace to run in a 440-yard hurdle race
- he won. Three weeks later he scored 173 not out for the Gentlemen of the
South against Players of the South at The Oval, having already taken seven
wickets whilst bowling unchanged throughout the Players’ innings.”

Grace’s
halcyon days were in the pre-Test cricket era. Peter Hartland reflected in his
book The Balance of Power in Test Cricket
1877-1998: “Picture him in 1873 as a 25-year-old, already known for
prodigious feats in track and field athletics. At this stage he scored more
runs in his short cricketing career - over 10,000 - than anyone else in history
to date, at more than double the average. His career average was now 61, the
next best being (reputedly the best professional batsman of the 1860s and
1870s) Richard Daft’s 29. Grace was literally twice as good as anyone who had
ever played. With a step-change in broad-batted technique, if not in style, he
was the first to show that cricket could be a batsman’s game; that bowlers could
be forced on the defensive for long periods. The remarkable thing to remember
about Grace is not so much his cricketing longevity, remarkable though that
was, but the fact that he established a lead over his contemporaries which has
never been equalled.”

It
must be remembered that Grace had to play on pitches in the 1860s that were
terrible for batting. Hartland continued, “….. pitches, still rough and ready
with scant regard for evenness or slope, had barely improved. The only tool in
regular use was the scythe, complementing the work of rabbits, sheep and, on
one reported occasion at Lord’s a brace of partridges.”

Batting
was a hazardous exercise as W.G. Grace’s own observation on wickets bears out:
“Many of the principal grounds were so rough as to be positively dangerous to
play upon and batsmen were commonly damaged by the fast bowling. When the
wickets were in this condition the batsmen had to look out for shooters and
leave the bumping balls to look after themselves. In the sixties it was no unusual
thing to have three shooters in an over.” And there were only four deliveries
in an over in those days!

Later
the tracks did improve somewhat, and it is no coincidence that in 1871, around
the time the heavy roller came to be used, Grace became the first batsman to
score 2000 runs in a season - 2739 runs at an average of 78.25 with 10
hundreds, including two double centuries. That was an age when there was a
clear demarcation between the amateurs and the professionals, or the Gentlemen
and the Players, as they were called. The Gentlemen were the aristocrats of the
game and invariably batsmen, while much of the hard labour, bowling, fell to
the lot of the Players. Most of the time it was the Players who triumphed but
as Marks recorded “Only during the Grace era did the Gentlemen dominate the
fixture. W.G. seemed to save his best performance for the occasion, which
serves to emphasise the fact that it was the most important game in the cricket
calendar.”

That
awesome hitter Gilbert ‘Croucher’ Jessop wrote in the July 1923 edition of The Cricketer International: “In the
early days the success of the Gentlemen depended almost entirely on the ‘Old
Man’. Fifteen centuries in all did he collect against the ‘Professors’ and on
two of the occasions he exceeded the double century. His brightest and best
patch occurred before I was born, when in consecutive innings from 1871-73 he
took toll of the Players bowling to the extent of 217, 77 and 112, 117, 163,
158 and 70. And in those days, mind you, the wickets, to say the least, were
not quite up to the standard of modern days. Yet against ‘rib-roasters’,
‘nose-enders’ - yes, even ‘shooters’ - did the Old Man keep his end up and
calmly pursue the path which leads to centuries. Rare indeed was the occasion
when ‘W.G.’ gave his wicket away, and yet few balls in the course of a long
innings passed his bat.”

W.G.
also bowled accurate medium-paced to slow leg-cutters and became the first to
perform the double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in a season in 1873.

Grace
came up with a stupendous performance in The Gentlemen versus The Players match
at Lord’s in 1876. Opening the batting, he scored 169 out of the team’s total
of 449. He then bowled 97 four-ball overs, taking three for 81 and six for 41
as The Players collapsed for 219 and 132 in their two innings. That year he
became the first batsman to score a triple century in first-class cricket and,
as if to celebrate, hit another, two innings later. His sequence of scores were
344, 177 and 318 not out, and in the month of August piled up 1279 runs.

The
1870s were a golden period for Gloucestershire in the County Championships,
W.G. and his brothers, Edward Mills and George Frederick, with a team composed
entirely of amateurs won the title jointly with Nottinghamshire in 1873, and
then on their own in 1874, 1876 and 1877, and never thereafter.

Hartland
continued, “When the Test match era began in 1877, the process of allowing the
batsman as fair a chance as the bowler, though reasonably advanced, still had a
long way to go.” In the early 1880s, the heavy roller was complemented by the
grass mower, which were used over tended soil. This made life a bit easier for
batsmen. Given the awesome stature that he had already acquired, it seemed
almost inevitable that W.G. would score a hundred on his Test debut. He did, at
the Oval in 1880, the second such distinction after Charles Bannerman’s feat in
the inaugural Test at Melbourne
in 1876-77. Grace’s 152 helped England
win by five wickets. Australian terror Fred Spofforth was injured during that
Test, but Grace was at his best against fast bowling.

His
duels with Spofforth were exhilarating, one such occasion being in what came to
be known as ‘Spofforth’s match’ at the Oval in August 1882 when Australia lost
at home for the first time. It was this Test that led to the creation of the
Ashes. On a treacherous wicket rendered well nigh unplayable due to rain, England
were set 85 to win. At 51 for two, with Grace still at the wicket, victory
seemed in sight. But he holed out to mid-off for 32, and England
collapsed to 77 all out. Spofforth took seven wickets in each innings, and the
rest is history.

In
1886 Grace performed the astounding feat of scoring a hundred and capturing all
ten wickets in an innings in the same match. He hit up 104 in MCC’s only
innings, and bagged two for 60 and ten for 49, against OxfordUniversity.

As
late as 1895, at nearly 47 years, Grace was a rejuvenated man. He resurrected
his career by becoming the first to score over 1000 runs in May, a cherished achievement
at the beginning of the English season when it is generally cold and damp, and
the ball darts around; and to notch up 100 first-class hundreds, achieving the
coveted landmark in the game against Somerset at
Bristol. As if
to celebrate, he went on to hit up 288 out of a total of 474. Grace was the
lone man to achieve these two distinctions in the 19th century. He
topped the run tally for the season with 2346 runs. The next year he made his
third triple century, two decades after he had compiled his first two.

Amazingly,
Grace was captain of Gloucestershire from 1871 to 1898. He led England in 13 Tests, playing 22 in all and
scoring 1098 runs at an average of 32.29 with two centuries both at the Oval
against Australia,
170 being the highest in 1886. Though he played his last first-class match in
1908, when he was sixty, the same year that Bradman was born, W.G.’s career was
effectively over by the close of the nineteenth century. His final appearance
at Lord’s for The Gentlemen was in 1899. He was still captain but did not bowl,
and batted only at no. 7, instead of his customary position at the top of the
order. He scored 78 before being run out, his age and bulk unable to meet the
demands of sprinting up and down the pitch with youthful partners.

As
Marks noted: “The Gentlemen won by an innings, which was hardly surprising
since the side contained many of the men who were to become legendary figures
of the Edwardian era (Archie) MacLaren, (C.B.) Fry, (K.S.) Ranjitsinhji, and
F.S. Jackson. On the Players side was a 21-year-old Yorkshireman Wilfred
Rhodes, who was to have the rare privilege - and pain - of bowling to both W.G.
and his Australian counterpart of the next generation, Donald Bradman.” Grace aggregated 6008 runs for the
Gentlemen against the Players - more than twice the next man - and also took
276 wickets.

In
addition to his three first-class triple centuries, Grace knocked up 10 double
centuries in his tally of 126 three-figure knocks. He made up 1000 runs in a
season 28 times, the only other player to achieve it so many times being Frank
Woolley. Grace scored a hundred in each innings of a match thrice. His career
aggregate of 54,896 runs at an average of 39.55 was then a record. It is
remarkable that in such a long career played on uncovered wickets of dubious
quality, Grace did not bag a single pair. Lord Harris paid his tribute later:
“Grace was just as watchful when his score was 200 as when he was on 0 - and
just as reluctant to leave the wicket on dismissal.” He also took 2876
first-class wickets at an average of 17.92 and, as was only to be expected from
a man of his temperament, a brilliant fielder off his own bowling. Amazingly,
even a century later, W.G. Grace is still fifth in the all-time rungetters
list, and sixth among the wicket-takers, in the first-class arena.

Vic
Marks, in The Wisden Illustrated History
of Cricket, summed up the career of cricket’s first superstar: “W.G. Grace
was to dwarf all others in the period 1865 to 1900. He became as celebrated as
Queen Victoria herself. Unwittingly Grace carried the game of cricket into the
modern era almost single-handed.” There is indeed little doubt that he
transformed the game and the public’s awareness of it. Perhaps appropriately,
the last word on Grace should come from his memorial biography published under
the auspices of the MCC. Sir Home Gordon eulogised, “That he will never have an
equal in the future is to us equally an axiom because never again will the
conditions under which it is played be so difficult as they were when he built
up his reputation by demonstrating his superiority alike over them and over his
contemporaries, a position he holds for decades.”

In the twilight of W.G. Grace’s long career dawned
what came to be known as The Golden Age of Cricket. This was the twenty-year
period before the First World War - 1894 to 1914. As Hartland explained in his The Balance of Power in Test Cricket
1877-1998: “This is largely because pitches had improved, but not too much,
and the balance between bat and ball was just about right. In England cricket
was at its highest level of popularity relative to other sports, notably
football. Another reason is that England
and Australia
were more evenly matched than at any time. (Test) Matches in England were still limited to three days, while
those in Australia
were played to a finish.” Vic Marks added in The Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket, “Most of the innovations
had already taken place, now was the time to lie back and enjoy the national
game at your leisure. The Empire was secure; all that was to be feared was the
possibility of a wet summer.”(Author Indra Vikram Singh can be contacted on email singh_iv@hotmail.com).

Many thanks for your compliments and good wishes, and great to hear from you again. As a talented sportsman yourself, you will understand what a great batsman W.G. Grace was, in fact the man who began it all. The next excerpt will feature K.S. Ranjitsinhji during the coming weekend.

Yes, we must meet soon. I am due to travel a bit later this month. I think February should be a good time for all of us to catch up.

About Me

Scion of the princely house of Rajpipla, now in the province of Gujarat, India, and descendant of the ancient Gohil Rajput dynasty, Indra Vikram Singh is a sportsman, entrepreneur, writer, author, editor and publisher. He is author of 'Test Cricket - End of the Road?' (1992), 'World Cup Cricket' (2002), 'The Little Big Book of World Cup Cricket' (2007 and 2011 editions), 'The Big Book of World Cup Cricket' (2011), 'A Maharaja's Turf' (2011) on the triumph of his grandfather Maharaja Sir Vijaysinhji of Rajpipla in the Epsom Derby of England in 1934, 'Don's Century' (2011) which is a biography of Don Bradman and a panorama of batting from the 1860s to the present times, and 'Crowning Glory' (2011) and 'Indian Spring' (2015), both on India's triumph in the ICC World Cup 2011. A talented allround cricketer, he captained teams of both his school and college. He was the moving force behind the setting up of sports complexes in Delhi in the latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s, and is now setting up a heritage resort.